openSUSE & Jurrassic Park

What should we do about Containerised Applications?

Containerised Application technologies like AppImage, Snappy and Flatpak promise a brave new world for Linux applications, free from the worries of shared libraries and dependency issues. Just one problem, this is a road long travelled before, such as in the application dark ages of Win32 applications and DLLs. And it worked out so wonderfully there... Do we risk a future where, like the resurrected dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, this family of applications will break their containment and start eating our users? This session will try to present a fair argument about the situation, frankly discussing the benefits promised by these technologies, but highlighting the very real issues and risks their widespread adoption could, and in some cases are, already bringing to the table.

The talk with cover the promised benefits of application containers, such as AppImage, Snappy and Flatpak. It will detail the empowerment of developers who use the technologies, the ability for upstream projects to have a much closer role in delivering their software, and the benefits that brings to both the upstream projects and their users. But as a counter to those benefits, the session will detail some of the risks and responsibilities that come with that technology. The complexities of library integration, the risk of introducing new forms of dependency issues, and the transference of responsibility for those issues, plus security, away from the current Distributions delivering upstream projects towards those upstream projects directly. As a conclusion, the session will start to ask the question, what the hell should openSUSE do about this mess? How much can we help fix it or mitigate the problems? How much do we want to be involved in that new world?